I, as Colonel Aku, the Japanese commander of the Imperial forces on Midway, faced Terry Sirk and Fred Haub, who were in charge of the Allied invading force. I had 6 tanks, 3 anti-tank guns, 4 MGs and 4 companies of infantry (each company consisted of 3 stands). Terry had set this game up, and I first noted the location of all my defending forces on a map, and second, diced to see how many of them suffered from the Allied pre-invasion artillery barrage. Just about every unit that I had placed in the front line was "suppressed"… they couldn't move or fire until they had rallied. Rallying required a toss of 5 or 6 on a 6-sided die, and after a couple of abortive attempts, I gave up on the rallying attempts.
CROSS FIRE (CF) is an 'initiative game'… you lose the initiative if one of 3 things happens:
- a. The opposition fires at you, and suppresses or destroys a unit
b. One of your units fires and fails to get at least a "suppress' reaction on the target
c. You attempt to rally a unit and fail.
It was this third event that proved unfortunate for me and Colonel Aku. After that, I simply ignored all the units that had been suppressed, and tried to work with what I had. Aku and I were losing too many initiatives, and couldn't afford to pass up opportunities to move and fire.
Around Bound #3, Terry drew our attention to a bridge table he had set up at table side. Here, he had set out the boardgame MIDWAY. And so we switched to the boardgame. I commanded the Japanese fleet, with 3 carriers, a battle ship, etc., while the Allies essentially had a similar size fleet. Here, I took the role of Commodore Yama… I had no idea of what we, Yama and I, were doing, or why, but we tried to locate the Allied fleet, and they, ours. Lots of air attacks were tossed for, and Yama and I lost lots of fighters.
Then I took all our Japanese planes and attacked the Allied ships… we Japanese had no reserve aircraft. We had fighters (which I found out weren't allowed to attack), and dive bombers and torpedo bombers. And we took out one of the Allied transports heading for Midway.
Then we returned to the miniatures table and played another couple of turns in which more of our Japanese troops were blasted. I tried to move a company (3 stands) forward to the beach area, but Fred Haub shouted "I can see you!"… and his units shot my company up completely.
Back to the boardgame. Again I attacked with all of my remaining planes, this time on the island itself. No reserve to protect my own fleet… if the Emperor wants to protect his carriers, let him send more planes, was what Yama and I agreed to. Result: I lost all 3 carriers. But in sending all of my planes over the island, I was able to outnumber the defending aircraft by 17… hence I got 17 "strikes" at the Allied units on the beaches.
I think that of the 17 strikes, about 4 were successful… the entire operation fell through. But Terry seemed to think that the Japanese sinking of the Allied transport had been a major stroke, for now the Allies wouldn't be able to send in a second wave of troops.
Victory or not, I wasn't pleased with the application of the CROSS FIRE (CF) rules to a large table-top battle. I've played CF many times, and in small squad-versus-squad skirmishes, all went well. Fred Haub and I are working on an extension of CF to a unit-size encounter.
Back to PW Review March 2000 Table of Contents
Back to PW Review List of Issues
Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List
© Copyright 2000 Wally Simon
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com